For the past month I’ve been working with a relatively inexperienced development team, and my role has been coach and mentor on development skills. I must say the team is doing a fantastic job putting up with my inexpert communication skills and have picked up pretty well what I want them to be focusing on.
The application that we’re working on is a web app, we’ve separated the tiers and have implemented some well known patterns for development in each of the tiers (go Command pattern!). This has been going well.
However, the hard part has been trying to get people to understand how important concepts like “dependency injection”, or “coupling and cohesion” are. What this really means is that my vocabulary isn’t good enough to explain it to them. I can show them (I built a spike) and I have worked with each of the team members on their coding to help prod them gently in the right direction.
In doing some searching, I’ve come across a couple of links that I thought were worth sharing, while they’re not “fancy-pants” architecture/pattern words, they’ve really helped in getting the team to understand what I’m really asking them to do, and in practicing these simple requirements, are starting to understand the concepts that I have been talking to them about.
For those who are interested the two main articles that I used were;
From Jim Shore and Kevin Rutherford.
I’ll report back later to tell all how the team is going, but early indications are that it’s working well.